Video Capture on PCI Power Macs

[lastmile77]

Can anybody comment on the quality of video captured on PCI Power Macs (ie 7500, 8500, 8600, etc) compared to video capture cards of their day? I've owned several pro capture cards in the past (Truevision/Pinnacle Targa 2000, Aurora Igniter, etc) but don't currently have any and never really did a comparison to the quality on the AV Macs. I have some more S-VHS conversions to do and haven't seen any of the old cards I liked available recently. Even with VHS I have seen differences between capture hardware. Oh and the Beige G3 is out due to its limited capture resolution.

Since OS 9-compatible gigabit PCI cards are more readily available than I thought (several Asante cards are on ebay at the moment) I've considered getting an old Mac, doing the capture on it and then transferring the file over to a new system for conversion with Handbrake. Capture would be uncompressed which is no problem since I've still got old SCSI cards and sizable, fast drives.

Since I have an iMac there's no option for PCI cards in the new system. I did get quite good captures with an Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus and that's a possible option but when I last had one I found it irritating that I had to set it on the most processor intensive processing level to get a decent picture when using it to watch HDTV which is its main purpose. It just happened to also be good for standard def capture. It worked fine but it bothered me that had I had a slower Mac it would have been a wasted purchase.

Gigabit in an old Mac also makes me wonder about one's usefulness as a low-power (at least lower than a quad-core PC) file server.

 

[Unknown_K]

Built in video on those machines will do 320x240 at 15 fps or so and will probably have issues with sound shifting over time. If you want decent captures get a capture card. The PCI PPC models with A/V are not much different then the beige G3's.

If you did get a decent old PCI capture card you would then have to do something about storage drives so you do not lose any frames (built in SCSI is too slow).

Targa 2000's are pretty nice (I have a Targa 1000, 2000, 2000 pro in my collection mostly installed in beige G3's), or a Media 100 might be good (and cheap).

And yes, transfering the files to another system to edit/convert would be a good idea (or just connect the external RAID array directly to the faster machine).

 

[Osgeld]

I dunno, when I had my 8500 it maybe was a bit better than my winTV tuner (which was about the same age, I did have my playstation 2 hooked up to it for ever so I could play those games on my LCD cause I refused to believe I needed glasses and TV was really just that bad) and I dont know about pro gear but the new one I have in my pc is a pile of junk, If i ever get off my butt I am going to switch it out for the nearly 15 year old winTV card

 

[lastmile77]

I know the Beige G3 is limited to 320x240 which I always thought was strange. The earlier Macs will do 640x480 but you could be right about the sound getting off. I wonder how many people were actually using the built in hardware to capture 1-2 hours of uncompressed video back when they were new. Given the storage it would take, probably not many. I would think those with RAID capacity to do that would be using pro cards.

The last Targa 2000 card I had sold for almost nothing but lately I've seen some incomplete sets go for over $100. And you need that annoying video loop-back cable if you want to see video on the computer monitor. Those cards are better in a Mac than a PC since you run into a file size limit in WinNT but not OS 9.

I've got several SCSI cards and both internal and external drives and cables so dropped frames shouldn't be an issue.

Osgeld's comment about his new PC tuner being junk is why I asked this question - newer is not always better. I thought about getting a WinTV-HVR-1600 for the PC since I could also use it as a HDTV tuner but it won't do uncompressed captures.

 

[Hrududu]

The trick to good video capture on PCI Powermacs is writing to a drive that is fast. For years I couldn't figure out why the video I captured was always full of dropped frames and choppy. I then figured out it was due to the slow write speed on the internal SCSI drive. I added in a PCI FireWire card and used an external FW drive to write the raw footage, and it looks great! So i've captured straight from VCR onto my 7600 and loaded it up on YouTube and it works pretty well. I've never used anything other than the built in video ports though.

 

[Unknown_K]

You needed a high end Targa 2000 or was it 3000 that did uncompressed, but for VHS tapes thats a bit overkill anyway. Targa 2000's used to be pretty cheap, but those deals seem to be long gone (glad I grabbed them while they were cheap). The video loop back cable was needed for the PC to merge the capture picture into the main screen, for the mac you just ran a second monitor (unless you are talking about the video I/O dongle).

TV tuners for computers have generally been crap no matter what age they were.

 

[lastmile77]

The 3000 does uncompressed. I actually have a breakout box for one but have been waiting to find a cheap board. I'm not sure they'll work in a Mac. The CineWave was Pinnacle's Mac product at the time though I had someone tell me he used a Targa 3000 in a G5. And I've had no luck finding any software downloads for the 3000 online. Though I have found some documentation including something on a program (sounds as if it were free from Pinnacle) called MPEGWorks that did real-time transcoding to MPEG2 using the Targa hardware. And after keeping an eye on ebay for awhile I actually spotted one of the 3DVE effects daughtercards though it was on the SDI version of the card with a price way too high. That's another thing I keep finding docs on but no forums posts or other things from anyone that actually had one.

The 2000 drivers, etc were around a few years ago but difficult to find and seems to be gone now to. But I kept a copy of the Mac and PC CDs when I sold mine. Some of the Avid systems (both Nubus and PCI) used Targa cards and they show up cheap since people have no clue what they are. I'd love to know if they will work stand-alone. They're typically connected to a second card by a ribbon. The 2000 manual references an Abekas 3D effects card which seems to be the Avid card though I don't know if Avid called it that. Other than that I've never seen any reference to it besides old Pinnacle press releases. Maybe it ended up never being sold outside of Avid systems.

I've seen some posts elsewhere recommending the Aja Kona 2 which does SD and HD but is PCI-X and I believe limited to PowerPC. They show up on ebay relatively cheap (considering what a HD capture card normally costs) since editors have moved onto Intel Macs with PCIe. I should have grabbed one a few weeks ago that was buy-it-now complete with all cables, breakout box, etc for $300.

But, this is all getting a little bit away from my original post about a cheap old Mac.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I use an Aurora Fuse in my MDD which uses hardware accelerated MJPEG compression, but this is probably more oomph than you had in mind.

 

[mac2geezer]

Since OS 9-compatible gigabit PCI cards are more readily available than I thought (several Asante cards are on ebay at the moment)

If you don't mind divulging where such cards are on eBay I could sure use one. I stared at eBay pages until cross eyed today and didn't see any Gigabit cards that looked like they would work in OS 9. Darn few that had drivers for OS X even.

I have a D-Link DGE-530T card here but have only been able to fine drivers for 10.2 - 10.3 and would like to get a Gigabit card for 9.2.2 in the 9600, unless someone can point me to a driver for OS 9 for the DGE-530T.

 

[lastmile77]

Actually I'd like to find an Aurora Igniter or other card. But if I'm going to go that route I'll probably hold off for a high-end version. I have a Igniter breakout box (and other currently for sale on ebay), just no card at the moment.

There are some Asante GigaNix cards on there. If you go to the Asante website there's one page with a long list of cards and info on them. I looked through that to find the ones that work in OS 9. I believe one even had OS 8.x listed. There was one (1000TA I think) on ebay for something like $2.99 but shipping from Canada was ridiculous.

 

[Unknown_K]

Were those GB ethernet cards PCI or PCIX?

As far as a cheap capture card, I kind of like my Matrox RTMAC in a B&W G3 with G4 upgrade (its a PCIX card).

 

[Osgeld]

I loved my matrox card, that is kind of their bag, but unfortunetly the one I had needed to be bound to a small range of video cards to work, and as great as that quality was/is its hard for me to use a 1mb PCI card post y2k :-/

course they still produce stellar products at a equivalent cost which suits them to the pro market, unlike the "olden days"

before 3d acceleration came to be "required" you couldn't get me off of matrox, unfortunately they were unable to keep up with nvidia and ATI aside from the supertard workstation cards which is a shame considering the first 3d accelerator I had was a matrox and it was pretty durn good for the time (though software usage was very limited)

 

[Unknown_K]

Matrox cards were players in the early 3D gaming craze and a little into the middle 3d game range. The original Matrox Millenium had some simple 3D going on if the game was coded for it (like a racing game that came with the card). The Mystique line did ok with 3D games like the bundled Mechwarrior but you needed patches for games and the Voodoo series pretty much killed that line. Later you had the G series G100/200/400 ending with the G400 max that did bump mapping very nicely for DirectX7 era games. After that they pretty much gave up like everyone else except for ATI and Nvidia.

Few people are aware that Matrox had a professional capture line for a very long time. I have some EISA/ISA cards (like 4 or 5 sandwiched together) that were kick-ass back in the day.

 

[Osgeld]

yea the setup I have is a Millenium 64 bit+ Monique + (i forget the name) capture card, the capture card plugs into the vesa port on the MGA64 and the 3d acclerator (nec power VR based similar to the sega dreamcast) was stand alone over the bus

Trifecta of power (for 1996 -98 ish) then I daisy chained a pair of voodoo 2's in SLI mode onto it, yea at one point I had a PC with 5 video render devices in it, and it ROCKED!

then I bought a Geforce 256 DDR for my new 850Mhz athlon , um yea end of story

 

[lastmile77]

Well I may get a chance to answer the question that started this thread. I picked up an 8500 with a Sonnet G3 upgrade last night for $10. Also won a Asante gigabit card for $15 shipped on ebay. However the 8500 is filthy and may not get any attention for awhile.

 

[CJ_Miller]

It can be done, but I have not dabbled with it for some time. If your PPC has a fast-ish CPU, RAM, and upgraded SCSI or Firewire the results might be decent. I am searching now, I remember that somebody - I think a German hacker - made an improved streaming program for the 8600 which supposedly allowed 640x480 at 30fps. I found it difficult to use, and my SCSI is too slow anyway. If I find a link I will post it here.

Most of my video capture experience was an Aurora Fuse card in my MDD G4. The sync issues were crazy! Audio and video were find but they were out of sync with a non-linear curve and it took me hours with QTMutator and other sync utilities for the results to approach anything remotely decent. I have never heard of anybody else having major Fuse sync problems, might just be my setup.

As I type this I am encoding a tape with a Wired MediaPress card, and anxious to see how it turns out. In the past I have had iffy luck with this sort of thing.

 

[trag]

When one records an MJPEG video with the Fuse or VideoVision, is there an easy way to convert that into an MPEG2 or MPEG4 format?

BTW, RealTek used to have drivers for their Gigabit enet RT8169 chip for both OSX and Classic. So you might try looking for a PCI card based on the RT8169.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Not in OS 9 that I am aware of. You could spit out an MPEG-1 (Toast has an extension to do this, among others), but not -2 or -4. OS X can do it, of course.

edit: for CJ_Miller, never had any issues with sync on my Fuse. I had more with my Formac ProTV, but that was probably due to the CPU issue (it offloads a lot to the host computer).

 

[Unknown_K]

Sync issues are common when the capture card relies on the computers built in sound inputs. Very old versions of Premiere had issues with sync even on Videovision setups.